From time to time I get emails from youth workers asking for advice on how to help kids who cut. I’m certainly no expert nor do I have any licenses or degrees that permit me to speak on the matter with any kind of authority, but I have worked with several cutters in the past and have learned a bit both through those experiences and my own personal research. Maybe some of these tips will help some of you, as well.

1. Listen to their pain
There’s usually something deeper in a student’s life that’s causing them so much pain that they’re not even sure how to deal with it. They take the emotional pain they feel and express it physically on their body and in doing so create a visual of what they feel inside. For those several minutes, they’re no longer focused on the internal pain and that feels good. For some cutters, there’s not necessarily a “painful experience” in their lives or their past, it’s just that cutting is the only thing they feel they can control in their life. Or, they feel so much pressure to succeed and do well in school that cutting becomes their coping mechanism. So when you meet a cutter, listen to them. Don’t make judgments, jump to conclusions or offer advice, just let them speak and share their stories. That outlet alone can work miracles.

2. Ask questions
The flip-side to this is that sometimes a cutter doesn’t even know where to start talking about their their pain or their addiction to cutting. In cases like this, some questions can help prompt a response and get you both headed in the right direction. Try some of these:

• Why do you feel that you need to hurt yourself? What has brought you to this point?
• Have you been here before? What did you do to deal with it? How did you feel then?
• What have you done to ease this discomfort so far? What else can you do that won’t hurt you?
• How do you feel right now?
• How do you feel when you are hurting yourself?
• How will you feel after hurting yourself? How will you feel tomorrow morning?
• How will hurting yourself affect others that care about you?
• How will it affect your relationship with God?
• Can you avoid this stressor or deal with it better in the future?
• Do you need to hurt yourself?

3. Cutting can become a chemical addiction
Expecting someone to stop cutting just because it’s bad for them is like asking a smoker to just stop smoking. The chemical addiction is hard to break. When someone cuts, it releases endorphins into the blood stream, which produce a sense of well-being, like a natural pain killer. It’s easy to become addicted to that feeling and those chemicals in the blood, but unfortunately, like most addictions, it can lead to a downward spiral of needing more and more to feel the same “natural high” as before. This leads to more frequent and deeper cutting even though the cutter may no longer remember what caused him/her to start cutting in the first place.

4. Find good Christian counseling for the student
Never try to be a hero and think you can help a student like this on your own. Most youth workers are not clinically trained to handle situations like this, so partner with a professional Christian counselor in your area. Unfortunately, I’ve found this to be a pretty sticky process because some students cut because of situations at home involving their parents. Since the student is a minor, they can’t see a Christian counselor without their parent’s consent, but on the other hand, if the parent finds out their daughter is cutting, they might backlash on her even more. So call the Christian counselor and seek their advice.

5. Encourage them spiritually
Never underestimate the power of prayer. Pray for the person! Depending on confidentiality, gather others to pray. Whether they want to cut because of anger, frustration, sorrow, to feel the pain, numbness, whatever, God knows about it. Their prayer is not going to surprise Him at all. Encourage them to tell God why they want to cut. Encourage them to go into details if that helps, just let it all out. Also teach the cutter how to spend time with God, how to read the Bible and how to take their pain to Him. Do your best to help the cutter mature spiritually and use the power of the Holy Spirit to live for Him in all areas of life.

6. Surround the cutter with encouragement
In one of my past youth groups a cutter attended who didn’t feel like she was very special to anyone, but whenever she walked through the door at youth group everyone always clapped and got excited saying, “Hey, Melissa is here!” (as we did for everyone who walked through the door). It was at that moment that a smile would creep across her face, the only smile she’d have all week. Through that environment and the feeling of safety and love, she began to talk about her problems and found a group of other girls who would support her and encourage her. What a difference that made in her struggle with cutting!

7. Research cutting yourself
Amy Sondova, Editor of YMExchange.com and YMX: All Access, wrote an extensive and very helpful handbook for youth workers on the issue of self-harm called, When Cutting Comes to Church: How Youth Workers can help teens who self-injure. Download her ebook free of charge from here.

Here are some other sites that might prove to be helpful, as well.

• Self help: tips for stopping yourself from making that cut or burn or bruise right now
• Self-injury.org
• Stopping self-injury

8. Offer some alternatives
I’ve found that encouraging exercise can be somewhat helpful if the cutter isn’t already a hardcore athlete because exercise also releases endorphins and may give them that temporary “high” without having to cut.

Below are some other suggestions you can offer to someone who struggles with cutting, categorized according to the reason the person wants to cut. This list was sent to me via email several years ago by a ministry that no longer exists. I’m not sure I’d recommend all these alternatives, especially since none of them actually deal with the root issues of pain, but maybe they could be helpful as a temporary substitute for self-injury in a severe situation.

Angry, Frustrated, Restless
Try something physical and violent, something not directed at a living thing:

• Slash an empty plastic soda bottle or a piece of heavy cardboard or an old shirt or sock.
• Make a soft cloth doll to represent the things you are angry at. Cut and tear it instead of yourself.
• Flatten aluminum cans for recycling, seeing how fast you can go.
• Hit a punching bag.
• Use a pillow to hit a wall, pillow-fight style.
• Rip up an old newspaper or phone book.
• On a sketch or photo of yourself, mark in red ink (non-toxic) what you want to do. Cut and tear the picture.
• Make Play-Doh or Sculpey or other clay models and cut or smash them.
• Throw ice into the bathtub or against a brick wall hard enough to shatter it.
• Break sticks.
• Crank up the music and dance.
• Clean your room (or your whole house).
• Go for a walk/jog/run.
• Stomp around in heavy shoes.
• Play handball or tennis.

Sad, Soft, Melancholy, Depressed, Unhappy
Do something slow and soothing:

• Take a hot bath with bath oil or bubbles
• Curl up under a comforter with hot cocoa and a good book, babying yourself somehow.
• Light sweet-smelling incense.
• Listen to soothing music.
• Smooth nice body lotion into the parts or yourself you want to hurt.
• Call a friend and just talk about things that you like.
• Make a tray of special treats and tuck yourself into bed with it and watch TV or read.
• Visit a friend.
• Do whatever makes you feel taken care of and comforted.

Craving sensation, Feeling depersonalized, Dissociating, Feeling unreal
Do something that creates a sharp physical sensation:

• Squeeze ice hard (this really hurts). (Note: putting ice on a spot you want to burn gives you a strong painful sensation and leaves a red mark afterward, kind of like burning would.)
• Put a finger into a frozen food (like ice cream) for a minute.
• Bite into a hot pepper or chew a piece of ginger root.
• Rub liniment under your nose.
• Slap a tabletop hard.
• Snap your wrist with a rubber band.
• Take a cold bath.
• Stomp your feet on the ground.
• Focus on how it feels to breathe. Notice the way your chest and stomach move with each breath.
• (NOTE: Some people report that being online while dissociating increases their sense of unreality; be cautious about logging on in a dissociative state until you know how it affects you.)

Wanting focus

• Do a task (like Tetris or Minesweeper, writing a computer program, needlework, etc) that is exacting and requires focus and concentration.
• Eat a raisin mindfully. Pick it up, noticing how it feels in your hand. Look at it carefully; see the asymmetries and think about the changes the grape went through. Roll the raisin in your fingers and notice the texture; try to describe it. Bring the raisin up to your mouth, paying attention to how it feels to move your hand that way. Smell the raisin; what does it remind you of? How does a raisin smell? Notice that you’re beginning to salivate, and see how that feels. Open your mouth and put the raisin in, taking time to think about how the raisin feels to your tongue. Chew slowly, noticing how the texture and even the taste of the raisin change as you chew it. Are there little seeds or stems? How is the inside different from the outside? Finally, swallow.
• Choose an object in the room. Examine it carefully and then write as detailed a description of it as you can. Include everything: size, weight, texture, shape, color, possible uses, feel, etc.
• Choose a random object, like a paper clip, and try to list 30 different uses for it.
• Pick a subject and research it on the web.
• Try playing some games.

Wanting to see blood

• Draw on yourself with a red felt-tip pen.
• Take a small bottle of liquid red food coloring and warm it slightly by dropping it into a cup of hot water for a few minutes. Uncap the bottle and press its tip against the place you want to cut. Draw the bottle in a cutting motion while squeezing it slightly to let the food color trickle out.
• Draw on the areas you want to cut using ice that you’ve made by dropping six or seven drops of red food color into each of the ice-cube tray wells.
• Paint yourself with red tempera paint.

Wanting to see scars or pick scabs
Get a henna tattoo kit. You put the henna on as a paste and leave it overnight; the next day you can pick it off as you would a scab and it leaves an orange-red mark behind.

I just put together a quick video and small group discussion sheet for youth group tonight. Here it is for download in case any of your groups can benefit from it:

SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION SHEET

NEWS INTRO AND TRIBUTE VIDEO

TIPS FOR THE DISCUSSION LEADER

Listen more than you talk: The most beautiful thing you can do for a grieving teenager is to be a good listener. They may need to share the same stories over and over again. Provide a safe place for them to do that. Effective listening requires that helpful advice remains unspoken until the student wants input and is ready for advice. Preaching about God’s sovereignty or reminding teenagers that “things happen for the best” is not recommended and may perceived as insensitive.

Don’t place judgment on the students’ feelings: Some will be very angry, some will be depressed and others may be seemingly indifferent. Don’t offer counseling or make judgments on their emotions – just listen to them and encourage them to speak their heart. The purpose here is not to fix or correct their feelings, it’s just to listen. Their emotions are not wrong, they just are.

Don’t be afraid of silence: Don’t feel a need to fill in moments of silence with your own interpretations or as a queue to quickly move on to the next question. This is often the time when students are processing their thoughts or trying to figure out how to verbalize their emotions. Give them time to think and break the silence when they’re ready to do so. Only move on to the next question when you feel the current one has been exhausted.

[tags]Virginia Tech, small groups[/tags]

Here’s a summary list of every issue in youth ministry that’s been mentioned by one of the series contributors. Whew! There certainly are a lot of issues that need to be addressed.

Discuss: Which of these issues apply specifically to your youth ministry? What changes can you make to address them in 2007?

What do you see as some of the main issues youth ministry is struggling with today?

• Students are under a tremendous amount of stress and pressure.
• It is vital that we remind them constantly that Jesus needs to have first priority in their lives and that He holds their future in His hands. Students are so busy and God and church is not always the #1 priority.
• We need students to be global Christians.
• The idea of godly sexuality for all people needs to be put back on the agenda.
• Mental health.
• The whole question of “church” is becoming more and more of a struggle for youth ministry.
• Professional youth pastors and senior pastors looking for job security.
• This generation is facing identity issues, sexuality issues, authority issues, and vocation/purpose issues, but in a much more intense, aggressive, combative, pluralistic context.
• Discipleship and teaching students to grow on their own.
• Retention after graduation.
• Engaging parents.
• Cultural relevance. The Church is often reluctant to change sufficiently to genuinely include the young people.
• Defining Success.
• Recruiting and training adult volunteers to be effective.
• Presenting God as the right and better choice over pop culture.
• A lack of understanding of youth culture and no desire to learn it.
• We’re spending so much time trying to keep the ones we have that we are not reaching the lost.
• The church leadership believes there are only a couple of kids caught up in major issues and the rest of the kids are great, god fearing and perfect.
• Employed Christian youth workers are only deployed where there are churches with significant financial resources, meaning deployment is based on money not need.
• The “dumbing down” of programs because of the myth that junior high students cannot go “deep.”
• Connections between people and real community.
• We should be focusing more on is inner-city and “fringe” type of neighborhoods and young people.
• The issue of personal holiness, from youth ministers to parents to students. Our calling should be to BE children of God and pant after Him so that teens can see HIS power in our lives.
• Apathy of the “cradle-Christian” student.
• Not enough long term funding or funding in general.
• The church allows the youth to be isolated, and sometimes they want the youth isolated, which is anything but unifying for the church.
• Viewing youth ministry as a stepping-stone to becoming a Sr. Pastor, as if it’s important to practice ministry on “little people” before being qualified to work with “real people.”

What do you see as some of the main issues youth ministry is responding to effectively?

• Loving teens and connecting with them in their world.
• The call to missions.
• Youth ministry is attempting to address the same issues that the adult church may be after, but the amazing thing is that there is more of a willingness to experiment.
• Provides a safe place for hurting students. We are responding to the deep-seated hurts of teenagers in more effective ways than ever.
• Giving students time and space to be in community with each other.
• A desire to do ministry outside of the church and where kids are.
• Youth ministry allows young people to encounter adults (and young people) who seek to live a 24/7 faith and model a life that’s Christ centered and counter cultural.

In what ways does youth ministry need to change?

• We need to make sure we’re taking our young people deeper into their faith. But not just in Bible studies, but in their experience of mission, church, worship and so on.
• Students need to be IN ministry and not just the recipient of it. If students don’t lead they’ll leave. We need to believe in students and their ability to minister effectively to their peers.
• Relational-driven is more work and less to show…at first.
• Do your deal, follow Jesus, create this environment in the student ministry IF YOU CAN. If you can’t – shut up and leave and find a place where you can if it’s that important to you.
• Less reliance on programs.
• Less “next big thing” thinking.
• Less trendy, fad, youth workers.
• Longevity. Finding a way to keep youth pastors and leader in their positions for the long haul.
• Youth ministers need to adopt more of a “Family Ministry” rather than a “Youth Ministry.” Parents need to be central to the process of our teenagers’ spiritual formation and not disengaged bystanders.
• Emotional health.
• We need to have a plan for when the kids arrive in 6th grade they graduate high school knowing the fundamentals of scripture while at the same time encountering God rather than just being taught facts about Him.
• Plug students into the greater body of Christ.
• Church leaders need to understand what youth pastors are facing and stand with them in a major way.
• Giving opportunity to live faith not just hear about it.
• There is a pretty big void when it comes to Junior High Ministry Curriculum.
• Starting where young people are instead of where we want them to be.
• Student ministry needs to change first in the heart of Lead and Senior pastors across America.

[Read previous authors and posts in this series, "Issues in youth ministry."]

What do you see as some of the main issues youth ministry is struggling with today?

As the church faces cultural issues, youth, I think, deal with these even harder, because they’re younger, more impressionable, and still searching for their version of right and wrong. Example(s): Homosexuality, Abortion, offensive Speech, Materialism, etc. How do we convey to students what God wants, but more importantly, how do we present that God, who flies in the face of popular culture like an unwanted relative, actually is the right and better choice than pop culture?

My divine paradox: The idea of God as entertainment is purely repulsive to me. However, when we present God, we have this illusion that we must be entertaining. (That’s not to say that genuine passion can’t exist within the parameters of entertainment.) So we’re entertaining with smoke, lights, sound, huge facilities, almost a rock concert because there’s this “new” God that students seem to be wanting. They crave a deepness with something they can’t see, yet almost everything that they can see, let’s them down. Walking the line of entertainment, passion for God, and genuine relationship with the same is an incredibly difficult and almost symphonic line to orchestrate.

What do you see as some of the main issues youth ministry is responding to effectively?

I think youth ministry gives hurting students that place they can feel safe. Regardless of whether or not they find (much less seek) God, they find someone who loves them and cares for them, in a safe place. The American family is no longer the constant place of emotional safety. Mom and Dad have been defining themselves by the success of their careers, not their success as parents. Thankfully, I saw an ABC report [a couple weeks ago] that says this may be shifting from the former towards the latter.

Evan Mattei is a youth pastor in the Dallas, TX area. Visit his blog at http://youthguyevan.blogspot.com/.

[Read previous authors and posts in this series, "Issues in youth ministry."]

Last week I had an extended conversation with a friend who’s graduating from Bible college this semester. She came to me saying, “I’m wrestling with some issues concerning our theology of salvation. I tried talking with our college Chaplian about it, but he was no help because apparently he swallows everything he’s taught.” So we talked at length about her questions, which were very legitimate and well articulated. When we finished she said, “Thanks for being willing to wrestle out loud with me on it. Most people won’t.”

Marko had a good blog post today about this very subject. He says (and I agree) that it’s important for teens to question their faith and ask the hard questions. My question is why the church at large generally frowns upon those who ask tough questions and challenge the status quo. If our faith isn’t strong enough to hold up against these questions then maybe it really isn’t worth believing in the first place.

I consider myself to be someone with many questions who is also somewhat intimidated by the Christian public. I think that’s partly why I’m attracted to the blogging community, because here I find others who are also asking questions and are willing to give input into each other’s thoughts.

I graduated from PBU with a degree in youth ministry and filled up all my electives with counseling classes, but I think if I had to do it over again I’d reverse that and focus on counseling instead. Even though it was only four years ago, a lot of what I learned about youth ministry is out of date. Youth culture and thus youth ministry are constantly changing. I mean, there was no [tag]MySpace[/tag] generation even four years ago. But the counseling part of ministry I use over and over again almost every day. Even this morning I spent some time talking with a girl fresh out of high school who has a history of abuse and struggles with cutting and suicidal thoughts.

No matter what position someone holds in ministry — whether it be in music, youth, children, adults, administrative, whatever — as long as you’re working with real people, counseling is a very necessary skill. I’m not even a counselor but I talk with parents and students all the time and, after earning a little bit of trust, issues always come up.

I’m looking forward to [tag]Youth Specialties[/tag]‘ theCORE this year because apparently it’s supposed to deal with part of this issue by training youth leaders to work with hurting kids. Even though I was the administrative director for Teenhopeline.com and may have more experience than some, I still wish I had a lot more training than I currently do. We all need it. And the people we talk to probably appreciate it when we have it, too.

Self-image is an issue that is sometimes thought to mostly affect girls, but recently I am becoming more and more aware of just how much this affects guys, too. Of course girls feel an extreme amount of pressure from our society to look a certian way in order to be approved by people, but guys probably feel just as much pressure from our society, too. We’re told that men are tough, insensitive, physically strong, and in control. Several times lately I’ve observed guys comparing themselves to other guys to evaluate how they match up against what is accepted. Teenage guys probably struggle with self-esteem and insecurities about their bodies just as much as girls do.

At youth group we often try to compliment students and build their esteem with comments like, “Hey Jonny, I really like your hair! How much gel did that take?” Or, “Sally, that’s a beautiful skirt. You look really nice in it.” The problem with compliments like this is that it again places the focus on physical appearance for approval. We’re essentially confirming that what a student looks like is important in order to be verbally praised. What they really need to know, however, is that we approve and accept them because of who they are, not because of what they look like.

So, instead maybe we should build students’ self-image by complimenting their character. “Jonny, I saw how you helped Sally up when she tripped a minute ago. That was very admirable of you.” Or, “Sally, I’m proud of you for telling the truth when asked about cheating on your algebra test.” Maybe then we can reinforce the fact that what’s on the inside is more important than what is on the outside. Character trumps appearance any day.

In youth group the past two Sundays we’ve have fun talking about how to deal with conflict at home (improv drama is so much fun with this). Conflict is something no one likes but we all experience. Despite our wicked depravity, conflict doesn’t necessarily have to tear family members apart. With some ground rules established and mutual agreements set beforehand, conflicts can be civil, orderly, and handled with maturity.

For my lesson last Sunday I dug out some notes from one of my seminary marriage classes and tweaked them a little to be more youth oriented. However, the principles apply to anyone, so I decided to post ‘em here for you guys (click the “more” link below). Hopefully it will be helpful in making some of your relationships a success at home. As always, comments are welcome. Continue Reading